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Mardi Gras to the World |
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Friday, 27 January 2006 22:15 |
Mardi Gras to the World
By John Sinclair
What we now call jazz emerged around 1897 out of the rituals and activities of everyday life in New Orleans, its roots deeply embedded in the culture and experience of the Black Baptists and Catholics who had preserved, each in their own way, the quintessential elements of ancestral West African musical and social organization under the cover of the European religious forms imposed by their masters during the long nightmare of enforced servitude.
These two distinct streams of African-American culture--one rural and Protestant, the other urban and Roman Catholic--began finally to flow together in post-bellum New Orleans as a function of the steady influx of Blacks who had left the vast plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana by the thousands to seek greater economic opportunity and social mobility in the Crescent City.
These ex-slaves and sons and daughters of slaves brought Baptist spirituals and the deep country blues to the city as forms of musical expression, fused them with the marching music of the brass bands, and adapted the syncopated rhythms of ragtime -made popular locally by the city's finest pianists, from Tony Jackson to Jelly Roll Morton--as the very foundation of their fresh new musical approach. They lacked the formal sophistication of the downtown Creoles, but they more than made up for it with their unflagging exuberance and the incredible emotive power of the back-country idioms which they introduced to their urban counterparts.
In the local entertainment world, the relatively proper Creole musicians who had been painstakingly schooled in the European instrumental tradition found themselves face to face with the funk. Suddenly they had to deal with the raggedy blues and spirituals which were the stock in trade of the Uptown players, and they had to approach the repertoire of the ragtime band with the uninhibited enthusiasm and profound depth of feeling brought to these rude forms by their untutored rivals if they wanted to remain active as professional entetainers in the new age of strict Jim Crow segregation.
The jazz makers--with some well-noted exceptions, of course--were not pimps and ne'er-do-wells but mainly young laborers and craftsmen in or just out of their teens who aspired to the status of full-time professional musicians.
The best of these musicians pursued their craft in every available working situation, out in the sunshine as well as in the dark of night, playing the bars and dancehalls and low dives where the working-class crowds went to entertain themselves as well as the ubiquitous parades and picnics and family outings in the parks which were so much a part of Gay Nineties life in New Orleans.
The early ragtime bands moaned the blues and ragged up the popular show tunes of the day to the endless delight of the midnight dancers, but they also played dirges and spirituals for the mourners they accompanied to the cemetaries on somber weekdays, slow now and solemn on the way to the church and the gravesite and then, after "cutting the body loose" in a ceremony that went all the way back to West Africa, quick and spirited and joyful as the deceased's family and friends made a noisy return to their neighborhoods to celebrate together the good times they had shared and the good deeds done by the dearly departed that would live on in their collective memory.
The genteel dance music of the downtown Creole bands, modeled after the French prototype, hadn't the proverbial snowball's chance in Hell of satisfying the earthy tastes of the Black working-class partiers in joints like Funky Butt Hall, located just off the fabled corner of Rampart and Perdido streets in the seamiest section of town.
Young Louis Armstrong, who was born in 1901 and grew up in nearby Jane Alley, recalled looking through the cracks in the wall of the building at age 5 or 6 to see what was going on inside.
"It wasn't no classyfied place, just a big ole room with a bandstand. And to a tune like "The Bucket's Got a Hole in It" some of them chicks would get way down, shake everything, slapping themselves on the cheek of their behind. Yeah!"
II
Funky Butt, Funky Butt
New Orleans 1897-1912
It is at this point, three years before the dawning of the 20th century, that the first identifiable American jazz band, led by cornetist Buddy Bolden and based in uptown New Orleans, makes its auspicious appearance on the scene.
Six largely self-taught musicians who picked up their melodies by ear and transformed them through substitutions and improvisations, driven by the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and the street, and specializing in the rattiest, funkiest, nastiest renditions of the instrumental blues ever heard, the Buddy Bolden band gave America the music that would dominate its consciousness for the next century.
They didn't call it "jazz" in New Orleans until some years later--it was known simply as ragtime, "ratty" or "raggedy" music until around 1915, when a white band from the Crescent City was billed as Tom Brown's Dixieland Jass Band for their opening at Lamb's Cafe in Chicago--but people responded to this new sound like nothing they'd ever heard before.
Bolden's influence began to spread throughout the musical community until it had inspired a whole generation of young musicians to embrace its syncopated rhythms and blue tonalities, its dazzling instrumental virtuosity and endless melodic invention as an inescapable way of life.
For the better part of the ten years between 1897 and 1907, Funky Butt Hall served as home base for the first acknowledged jazz outfit to emerge out of the rich cultural matrix of uptown New Orleans, cornetist Buddy Bolden and his high-flying Eagle Band.
Buddy Bolden, "First Man of Jazz," by all available evidence devised a method of making music which drew upon the deepest wellsprings of African-American culture for its basic structure and technique, with little regard for the established conventions of European music and its American offshoots.
"Buddy Bolden cause these younger Creoles, men like [Sidney] Bechet and [Freddie] Keppard, to have a different style from old heads like [Lorenzo] Tio and [Manny] Perez," ancient jazzman Paul Dominguez told a researcher in the 1940s.
"He'd take one note and put two or three to it. He began to teach them--not by the [written] music ﾑ just by the head," Wallace Collins added. "They had lots of band fellows could play like that after Bolden gave 'em the idea."
Bolden, born in 1877 to an uptown Baptist family, turned 20 in 1897. He represented perfectly the new generation of people of color who knew nothing of slavery and were bent upon making a place for themselves in the modern world which could be shaped by their own individuality.
As a young musician closely in touch with his time, Buddy Bolden forged a synthesis which incorporated the instrumentation and repertoire of the Black brass bands, the rhythms and attitude of the Mardi Gras Indians, the funky blues and soulful spirituals he'd heard all his life, the sophistication and drive characteristic of ragtime, and the popular dance material played by the smooth downtown society bands at parties and outings.
Buddy Bolden put it all together and came out swinging so hard he knocked the entire musical community for a loop. His band set a new standard for popularity and impelled all others to investigate his conception in order to try to meet the mark this dynamic organization had notched in the public imagination.
Soon there were bands playing the blues all over town, but Bolden continued to rule as the musical 'King' of New Orleans until 1907, when he suffered a mental breakdown and was institutionalized in northern Lousiana for the rest of his life.
Buddy Bolden set the pace, and all New Orleans followed close behind. Upon his disappearance from the scene a succession of brilliant trumpet players took up the crown and moved on to carry the new sound around the country. Others, like Chris Kelly and Henry 'Kid' Rena, stayed in New Orleans to maintain the intimate relationship between the music and the life of the community that had given birth to it.
But once the music was heard in Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago and New York, the Crescent City could no longer lay exclusive claim to the sound of jazz.
III
New Orleans Calling
1912-1921
The music began slowly to take over America, insinuating its rhythmic insistence, its intelligence, spirituality and humor into the fledgling forms of American popular music being fashioned from European folk and art music materials, ragtime and show tunes.
Early jazzmen like Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, King Oliver and Sidney Bechet carried the music out of New Orleans to Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York and San Francisco, inflaming local players with their visionary sound and invigorating existing musical forms with the energy, inventiveness and drive embodied in their unique approach to ensemble performance.
Pioneering "classic blues" singers like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter--backed by exciting little jazz bands of the highest caliber--criss-crossed the South and headlined theatres in Atlanta, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and New York City, bringing the sound of jazz and blues to the myriads of former Southerners who had just begun to relocate in the urban centers of the North.
Freddy Keppard, a downtown Creole born in 1889, was a teen-aged powerhouse when he formed his Olympia Orchestra in 1905 and then assumed the trumpet throne after Bolden was gone. Keppard took the first New Orleans band on the road, heading west late in 1911 to establish the Original Creole Ragtime Band in Los Angeles under the aegis of New Orleans bassist Bill Johnson, who had settled there two years earlier and sensed a ready market for the revoltionary music of his home town.
Keppard's outfit soon signed up with the Orpheum Theatre circuit, based in San Francisco, and worked up and down the West Coast, then introduced their sound to Chicago in 1914. They invaded New York City the following year and became a popular act on the East Coast until 1918, when Keppard broke up the band and settled in Chicago.
Keppard had been offered an opportunity to make the first jazz band recordings, but he found the Victor recording representatives "too business-like" and, according to Sidney Bechet, felt that if he accepted the Victor contract, "the music wouldn't be for pleasure any more."
When Keppard went west, the Olympia Band was taken over by A.J. Piron, and Joe Oliver replaced Keppard on cornet. Oliver, an uptowner born in the country town of Donaldsonville in 1885, was a veteran of the Melrose, Eagle, and Magnolia bands who had gotten the message directly from Buddy Bolden in his prime.
Oliver was already prominent as a bandleader when he took over Keppard's spot in 1911, and he was crowned the new trumpet king in 1914 by trombonist Edward 'Kid' Ory as part of the ballyhoo promoting a gig at Pete Lala's Big 25 Club. Thus it was Joe 'King' Oliver who emigrated to Chicago in 1918--with clarinetist Jimmy Noone and drummer Paul Barbarin--to establish his position as the leader of the next generation of jazzmen.
The great Creole pianist, Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton, likewise born in 1885, was playing ragtime in the high-toned Storyville bordellos as a teen-age prodigy and then began travelling in 1904, spreading the sound and approach of the New Orleans scene like a musical Johnny Appleseed.
Morton was in Memphis in 1908, where he instructed the W.C. Handy Orchestra on the uses of the blues. He hit St. Louis and then New York in 1911, where a very young James P. Johnson heard the Roll at Baron Wilkins' club in Harlem.
Morton passed through Chicago in 1912, playing clubs in "The Section" around 35th & State before heading west to Los Angeles and then criss-crossing the country at will for the next five years.
He settled in L.A. from 1917-22 and worked up and down the West Coast from Vancouver to Mexico. Everywhere Jelly Roll went he left his music behind: the "New Orleans Blues" in Memphis, "Frog-I-More Rag" and "Wolverine Blues" in St. Louis, and, with the 1915 publication of "The Original Jelly Roll Blues," Morton's pioneering jazz compositions started to become available to anyone who wanted to pick up the sheet music.
Another great Creole ambassador, reedman Sidney Bechet, born in 1897, made his mark at an even younger age. A clarinet progidy at age 6, Sidney was playing in the Eagle Band by 1908 and worked in a kid band with the even younger Louis Armstrong by 1911.
Bechet toured Louisiana and the South with pianist Clarence Williams during the early 'teens and joined the musical migration to the Windy City in 1917, working with Freddy Keppard, Joe 'King' Oliver and pianist Tony Jackson.
Discovered in Chicago by the great African-American bandleader, Will Marion Cook, Bechet went to New York with Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra in 1919 and then toured London and Europe, where he introduced the sound of jazz improvisation to astounded listeners all over the continent.
IV
The Jazz Age
1921-1929
With the several strains of African-American music finally out in the air for good, there was still nothing that could quite compare with the musical brew bubbling forth from New Orleans.
The early travels of New Orleanians Jelly Roll Morton, Freddie Keppard, Bill Johnson, Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet and others introduced the sound of jazz to Black audiences all over America, but it took a bunch of white musicians--former pupils of seminal New Orleans bandleader "Papa Jack" Laine--to put the sound of African-American music on the national map in a big way.
Jazz crept into the national consciousness in 1915 when a white band from New Orleans led by Tom Brown was brought to Chicago and met with the derision of the local players, who referred to Brown's approach as whorehouse music.
The owner of Lamb's Cafe, sensing a terrific promotional opportunity, billed his new attraction as Brown's Dixieland Jass Band, Direct from New Orleans, Best Dance Music in Chicago. During the same year the designation jazz also appeared in a San Francisco newspaper to describe the music played by a band featured at the San Francisco Seals' spring training camp north of the Bay area.
Brown's success in Chicago led the Booster Club to engage Johnny Stein's band from New Orleans in 1916 as competition. Band members Nick LaRocca (cornet), Alcide "Yellow" Nunez (clarinet), Eddie Edwards (trombone), Henry Ragas (piano), plus drummer Tony Sbarbaro (later Spargo) left Stein to take a job at the Del'Arbe Cafe in Chicago, spreading the music further into the Windy City. Tom Brown clarinetist Larry Shields soon replaced Nunez in the LaRocca group, and they went into Chicago's Casino Gardens as the Dixie Jass Band.
Tom Brown took his own group, now called the Five Rubes, to New York City for 11 weeks at the Century Theatre in 1916, offering a corny jazz-based entertainment complete with the funny hats and wild blazers which have ever since been identified with "dixieland" jazz. LaRocca's ensemble followed Brown to New York City, opening January 15, 1917 at the Paradise Club in the Reisenweber Building at 8th Ave & 58th St.
Billed first as the Dixie Jasz Band and then as The Original Dixieland Band--Creators of Jazz. this ensemble recorded for Columbia, Victor, and Aeolian Records in 1917-18 as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, cutting such staples of their repertoire as "Livery Stable Blues," "Dixie Jass Band One Step," "Ostrich Walk," "Tiger Rag," "At the Jazz Band Ball," "Fidgety Feet," "Sensation Rag," "Bluin' the Blues," "Jazz Me Blues" and "Clarinet Marmalade."
The ODJB went to London in 1919 to play Rector's Cafe and did a Command Performance before King George V, then returned to New York for work at the Folies Bergere on top of the Winter Garden Theatre before touring the USA, capitalizing on the interest their recordings and international touring had attracted to the new jazz music.
The Jazz Age was now on its way. Dancers all across the country were beginning to pick up on the hard-driving sounds of the funky New Orleans ensembles and their less earthy counterparts from New York to San Francisco, as well as the low-down offerings of the classic blues singers and their swinging accompanists like Perry Bradford and Clarence Williams. The first blues recordings would be made in 1920, and from then on the sounds of jazz and blues would dominate the American recording scene for years to come.
But the final blow was delivered by trumpet sensation Louis Armstrong, an Uptown kid from New Orleans who grew up in the shadow of the popular dance emporium known as Funky Butt Hall where the Buddy Bolden band regularly held forth.
Young Louis picked up a cornet somewhere and started to emulate the attack of Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Freddy Keppard, and his main man, Joe 'King' Oliver, until he was able to pick up some pennies playing in the streets with fellow urchins like Sidney Bechet.
A long stay in the Colored Waif's Home, a sort of reform school where he was sent for being caught firing a pistol one New Year's Eve, gained Louis some formal training in the institutional band, and upon his release he graduated into the ranks of the professional musicians. By 1918 he was featured in Fate Marable's crack ensemble, playing the excursion boats up and down the Mississippi River and getting the occasional chance to stretch out on a jazz number or two.
When Joe Oliver boarded the train for Chicago in 1918, a teen-aged Louis Armstrong was there at the station, looking wistfully down the tracks as his idol pulled out of New Orleans for good.
It would be four more years until Oliver sent back for Louis to join him in what had become Chicago's hottest ensemble, but when he finally moved on he would complete the conquest of the world by the musicians of New Orleans and lead the music into its next stage: the age of the virtuoso soloist.
Detroit
1990/
Oxfoe=rd, Mississippi
January 27, 2006
(c) 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
Revised from the rejected text of
Playboy's Illustrated History of Jazz & Rock
Part Two
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